Proposed extensions to ISO/IEC 14496-22 "Open Font Format"

[Levantovsky, Vladimir]

Dear all,

I would like to bring your attention to some exciting development in the font domain - Font Variations technology. As I am sure you remember, one of our mandates for the last three meetings was "To collect the requirements and proposals for future technology developments" and, as part of this effort, the members of the AHG discussed and identified font variations (formerly known as TrueType variations) as one such technology candidate (see the AHG Report to 114th WG11 meeting, m37775, submitted in February 2016). Recently uploaded input contributions from Microsoft (m39162), Apple (m39330) and Adobe (m39393) provide specific details summarizing  the proposed technical changes that would be necessary to introduce support for font variations.

For many of you this may not be a surprise as the proposals come on the heels of the recent public announcements at the ATypI 2016 conference of the joint, collaborative development effort lead by Microsoft, Apple, Adobe and Google (with participation of many independent contributors including FontLab, Monotype, Tiro Typeworks and many others). I am pleased to see all major industry players working together to introduce font variation support into the existing standard and committed to see it widely deployed in the near future; however, what is really exciting is the shock waves the recent announcements of font variation technology made on the design community at large. Among many excellent publications and posts on the subject, this one from Jason Pamental entitled "Variable fonts and the future of web design" (https://medium.com/isovera/variable-fonts-the-future-of-web-design-e45386b82c6a#.ej1kgq833) is remarkable in a number of ways. Jason has been right in his calls on many aspects of web design, and him saying that "This may be the most significant development for design on the web since responsive design itself" means a lot and may be the strongest endorsement for the font variation technology we've seen to date.

I'd also like to point your attention to the excellent primer on variation fonts coming from one of our own members John Hudson (Tiro Typeworks): https://medium.com/@tiro/https-medium-com-tiro-introducing-opentype-variable-fonts-12ba6cd2369#.e5z59m3dh

The specific technical changes that would be necessary to make it happen are outlined in the input contributions (attached to this email for your convenience). Any comments and opinions on the proposed technology would be highly appreciated!

I plan to dedicate significant part of the AHG report to these new proposals as part of the AHG presentation at the upcoming 116th MPEG (WG11) meeting next week.

Thank you,
Vladimir

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